LITMIR.BIZ

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it is. She didn’t say so. She left a book on automotive repair on her desk the week before Addie’s accident. It might even have been the day before. I asked her about it. She said she was having brake problems, and she was going to try to fix her car on her own—to save money. There were a couple things wrong with that.”

      “Such as?” Kendall asked.

      Chelsea shrugged her dream-catcher shoulder. “Well, for one, she was hooking up with a mechanic behind her husband’s back, and she was all about trading sex for favors. One time I admired a handbag she had and she told me that some old guy gave it to her because she let him feel her up in the parking lot at the mall.”

      “Sounds like she was a prostitute,” Kendall said.

      “Something along those lines. I doubt she took money for what she did. She more or less bartered for things. I really think that if she was having brake problems she’d have given that mechanic of hers a hand job and called it even.”

      “You don’t like her much, do you?” Kendall asked, giving Chelsea a little break from the story she was unwinding.

      “I used to,” Chelsea said. “I mean, I adored her. I thought she was the most amazing person that I’d ever met in my entire life. Sometimes I still think that. She was unencumbered by conscience, and that made it easy for her to really cut loose and live.”

      Hearing someone admiring another person for not having a conscience was a first for Kendall. She couldn’t help but wonder if Chelsea thought Ted Bundy was the epitome of self-direction and self-centered prowess.

      Except for the killing part, maybe.

      “You said a couple of things tipped you off that she might have been behind Addie’s death.”

      “Right. Later, after Addie died, and the police ruled it was an accident caused by a mechanical failure on her car, I mentioned to Brenda that I thought it was ironic that she’d been researching how to repair faulty brakes just before the crash.”

      “So you were suspicious, Chelsea? That’s why you asked her?”

      Chelsea didn’t agree with that at all.

      “No,” she said. “Not at all. I mean, it was possible that I was a little suspicious, you know, subconsciously, I guess. It was her response that made me wonder. She told me she thought it was ironic that she was researching brake-line repairs the day after Addie died—a week before the ruling came down from the police.”

      “But it wasn’t after the accident, was it?”

      Chelsea shook her head. “No. I know it was before. I know she was trying to get me to believe it was after, but I remembered that it was Thai food day in the office. A Thursday. I remember the pad thai container on her desk right next to the book. Addie’s crash was on a Friday. We were all off on Monday for the holiday. We found out on the Tuesday when we came back. By the following Monday, we’d learned the cause.”

      Chelsea hesitated over her cigarette pack, but thought better of lighting up another.

      “There’s something that’s really been bothering me,” she said.

      “I can tell,” Kendall said, reaching over to press on Chelsea’s hand. “You’re shaking.”

      Chelsea braced herself a little. She pulled back and wrapped her arms around her torso to stem the shudders that undulated through her body. One wave. Another. All the memories that she’d never given voice to had stirred something physical inside.

      “I feel sick,” she said. “Really, I think I’m going to throw up.”

      “Get up. Let’s walk a little. You’ll feel better,” Kendall said, standing first and holding out her hand.

      Chelsea stood and they walked toward the river’s edge.

      “I think I gave her the idea to kill Addie and to kill her husband and daughter. I think I did.” She bent over and coughed, but didn’t vomit. It was as though she wanted to purge her body of all that she’d been talking about, all that she’d held inside for so long.

      “You didn’t,” Kendall said.

      Chelsea held her ground. “I did,” she said, looking up at Kendall. “I told her about how insurance companies don’t really investigate accidents. It didn’t matter how much money was on the line. If the cops say it was an accident—and murder and arson are considered accidents—then they’ll just pay up. It costs too much money to do a full-on investigation if the cops don’t call it a homicide.”

      “But she didn’t collect on Addie’s death.”

      Chelsea looked Kendall in the eye. “She did,” she said. “At least I think she did. She drove up in a new Miata three weeks later. She didn’t have that kind of money. None of us did. She told me that an aunt had left her some cash, but she’d never mentioned any rich aunt before.”

      “You would have known if she’d collected. You worked for the insurance company and you processed claims, right?”

      “Yes, of course,” Chelsea said. “But that’s just the thing. Maybe it’s different now, but back then there was no cross-referencing between insurance companies. No automatic reporting to the authorities.”

      This was a lot to take in. The idea that Brenda was a serial killer was nothing new, yet it had long been believed by the authorities that her first kills had been her husband and daughter.

      “You’re suspicious,” Kendall said, “but you don’t know, and you shouldn’t put it on yourself, Chelsea.”

      “One time when Brenda was routing the mail in the office I saw a letter from one of our company’s competitors addressed to Addie. Brenda picked it out of the stack and said something about how Addie was trying to get a job there and she’d take care of it. She said it was Addie’s dream job. That’s so wrong. Insurance is no one’s dream job.”

      “Did you see what was in the letter?” Kendall asked.

      Chelsea gulped. “Yeah, I did. It was an application form.”

      CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

      Elan sat on the nearly deserted bleachers overlooking South Kitsap High School’s athletic field. He’d just completed four miles on the South Kitsap track, trying to keep his head on the run, instead of on Amber Turner. It was no easy task.

      There was something very special about her. She was a little beyond his reach. Maybe a lot.

      He didn’t have the kind of confidence that some of the guys had. He’d never really had a serious girlfriend. Never really had a girlfriend at all. The last time he took a girl anywhere was on the reservation, when he squired his dumpy cousin, Millie-Ann, to a school dance. It was a mercy date for Millie-Ann, but it felt a little that way for him too. Maybe a practice run for when he had the nerve to ask out a girl.

      It wasn’t that he hadn’t wanted to get a girlfriend; he just hadn’t been able to summon up the nerve. He’d been unsure about how his Native American heritage would play in a small, almost completely white, town like Port Orchard. He wondered if the fact that he’d been living with his Aunt Birdy would keep him out of the hunt for a girl—who wants to hang out with some guy whose aunt cuts up dead people all day?

      Amber Turner didn’t seem to mind any of that in the least. She’d gone through all her school years in South Kitsap. She seemed bored with the same old, same old. She wanted to know what it was like living on the reservation (not great, but not terrible either), how it was living with a forensic pathologist (she’s nice, but a little bit of a control freak) and if he’d been to any of his aunt’s autopsies (God, no).

      It was as though he’d been plucked from obscurity; from the anonymity of no longer being the new kid at a very big high school, to a guy with a girlfriend.

      “Want to hang out at my place?” he asked when Amber found him on

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